Chapter 9
The Craft Arcanum
Robin returned to the cottage to find Amon in the same state she'd left him in: a troubled sleep from which he couldn't be woken.
As darkness fell, Robin lit some candles around him. That seemed to calm him slightly.
She sat beside him and just looked at him. "Meditate. I need to meditate. The Craft Arcanum is inside me. I just need to find it."
She went to her own room and sat in the dark, closed her eyes, and tried to clear her mind.
"God help me," she prayed.
Several minutes went by. She focused on her breathing. She lost track of the passage of time.
Methuselah, she called into the mists of her mind. Why did you give me this power if it can't be used for good?
"It can be used for good," Methuselah answered, appearing from the fog. She simultaneously appeared as the old woman and a young woman near Robin's age, as if there were two people occupying one space, speaking the same words. "All power can be used for good or for evil. It's most often when you use it to benefit yourself that it becomes evil."
"I don't care about any of that right now. I just want to save Amon."
"But you still partly believe that power necessarily corrupts, that anyone with a Witch's power becomes evil. How can you listen to the wisdom of the Witches of the Ages if you will not trust a Witch's heart?"
"I will."
"You don't even trust your own Witch's heart."
It was true. She didn't.
"If you don't tell me how to save him, I will never trust Witches."
"It's not what I can tell you, it's what you will hear."
"Just tell me," Robin begged. "If Witch power can save Amon, just tell me how."
Methuselah's face softened in sympathy. "It's not so simple. But let's see what we can do. Show him to us."
Robin turned, and Amon appeared before her. He was lying on his futon, candles burning around him. Instead of walls, darkness spread out in every direction, and in that darkness were hundreds of people. Witches. They wore a variety of clothes, most of them very old-fashioned. Their faces reflected every race in the world. At their forefront was Methuselah.
"This is always the way," said a young woman with a British accent in Victorian-era dress. "Humans despise us and persecute us until they have a problem they believe Witchcraft can solve, then comes the begging, the apologies, the promises."
"This man is a Hunter," said an elderly man in ancient shepherd dress. "He is a persecutor and murderer of Witches, a traitor to his own flesh. Why should we even try to save him?"
"Because he has changed," Robin declared. "He was ordered to hunt me, ordered to kill me, and he didn't. He protected me."
"But he has killed so many other Witches. Saving one doesn't undo his crimes."
Robin didn't know what she could say to argue against that. She could claim that once the STN-J started using Orbo, Amon didn't kill Witches, only captured them, but he captured them to deliver them to a fate worse than death. She could say he only hunted Witches who were a danger to humans and other Witches, but they had hunted any Witch they thought might become dangerous, which had included Witches with strong powers even if they showed no indication of using them for evil.
They should save him because he was Amon, was all Robin could think.
"I am a Hunter too," she declared. "I too have killed my own kind, both Witches and Hunters. And yet I was entrusted with the Craft Arcanum. I have been told I am also the Eve of Witches, the Hope of Witches. I'm not sure yet what that means, what I am to do. You should save Amon because..." She looked down at him.
Trust your Witch heart...
"Because I love him."
After a moment, Methuselah knelt next to Amon. She placed a hand on his forehead, and another on his chest. A few of the others came up to examine him. One, a dark-skinned woman in a long black robe and blue headscarf, shook her head sadly. A man with long black hair and beard adorned with feathers touched him and shuddered.
"This is the new scourge of Witches, the poison that robs us of our strength and spirit. It has taken root in him. We have no spells to counter this."
"Nothing?" Robin whimpered. "All the powers of the Craft Arcanum, and there's nothing to save him?"
"This poison would suck up any power we might use against it."
"But there has to be some way to stop it. Orbo doesn't stop Craft spells. Isn't there any spell to help?"
"The power of the Craft comes from knowledge. We don't know this evil. You may need to create a new spell, using what you know of runecraft, to counter it. Even if the way is unknown, there always is a way."
"I don't have time," Robin despaired.
"I can help." A young girl in the dress of an ancient Egyptian stepped forward from the twilight. "I know a spell to slow time. If you cast it on your beloved, a day would become as a heartbeat to him. Be he dying, it will preserve his life long enough for you to find a way to undo the curse on him."
"Teach it to me," Robin implored.
When Robin awoke from her trance, she immediately set about gathering the ingredients she needed: flowers, flame, rice, and rainwater. The girl, Neferdeshret, said water from tears worked better, but it couldn't be the caster's tears, and Robin didn't know where she could get someone else's, whereas rainwater was something she had on hand.
The runes required for the spell were ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, not the Elder Futhark and Ogham she was familiar with. It took her a few tries to get the glyphs right. She set up the ingredients around Amon: the sprig of cherry blossoms at his head represented springtime and morning; the candle at his left signified summer and noon; the rice she scattered at his feet stood for the harvest, and therefore autumn, and she arranged the grains in the shapes of current early evening constellations; the rainwater, representing the cold of winter and the darkness of midnight, was in a vase at his right. Between them, in a circle, were the hieroglyphs encoding a slowing of the passage of time.
She lit the candle to complete the circle and activate the spell.
The candle flickered for a moment, then its movement slowed and slowed until it almost seemed frozen.
Robin looked at Amon. He didn't seem to be breathing or moving at all.
All she would need to do to break the spell would be to blow the candle out. When the candle burned down, the spell would break on its own, but that could take years.
Now that the spell was cast, nothing else entering the circle would be affected by it. She carefully stepped into the circle and knelt next to Amon.
When she'd admitted she loved him, it had felt like the truest thing she'd ever said.
"My beloved," she whispered. "If with all my power I can't even save you, I shouldn't live. If my powers can't be used for good, and you aren't here to keep me from becoming evil, I will not go on living." She kissed his forehead, then stroked his hair, gazing at his face. "Don't die, Amon," she pleaded. "Please don't die."
